Tag Archives: Circuit

Water Fall: Storm Surge

Posted by natechen on

One Week, One Day After the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Circuit

It took a little more than five minutes for me to get from the command bunker to my destination, although that was at least in part because I had to go up, over the tree line, and come back down again to locate exactly where the crossroads I wanted was. Finding a trail was easy enough, making sure I had the right portion of the trail was trickier. Flying below the treeline at thirty miles an hour was definitely not an option and positioning technology is a double edged sword – I could risk revealing my position to Project Sumter if they were waiting for me to ping a GPS satellite. I could still tell where the maglev relays around the park were positioned and that gave me a general idea of where I was, otherwise the trip could have taken three times as long.

I’d just started sifting through the trees, looking for a good ambush spot, when my earpiece dinged to life with Simeon on the other end of the line. “I think we have a problem, sir.”

“Bigger than planning a very personal lesson on death from above for Project Sumter?” I asked, trying to keep my voice down in case the wave makers on the other side could pinpoint my location just from that.

“Yes, sir, quite possibly.” There was a loud, indistinct noise on the other end, then the distinctive popping sound of small arms fire. “Agent Samson was with Project Sumter’s team.”

“Yes, I know,” I said, rapping my knuckles on a nearby tree with impatience. “What’s all that noise? You aren’t out with a patrol, are you? You’re-”

“I’m in the power reserve bunker, as you instructed.”

“Then what-”

“The noise is Agent Samson.” Cutting me off twice in a row was a sure sign Simeon was upset. “He’s infiltrated the bunker and is in the process of destroying our reserves.”

I slammed my fist into the tree and kicked the maglev back into high gear, shooting up and across the trees at top speed. “How did he get in? If nothing else you could have armed the antipersonnel mines at the entrance.”

“He used the back door.”

“That bunker doesn’t have another entrance!”

“He’s renovated.” Another indistinct noise, followed by the sound of a large, center core power transformer being dropped. Or, in this case, probably thrown. “Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, he is renovating.”

“It’s not renovation if you don’t put all the pieces back together into something new and beneficial, Simeon.” I swooped in towards the bunker. By pressing the maglev array to its limit I managed to make it back to the power reserve in barely two minutes, helped by the fact that it was closer to my starting point than the command bunker and the fact that I’d burned out a relay to do it – if I couldn’t save the power reserve then I wouldn’t be able to fly and fire empion grenades at the same time and, of the two, I needed aerial denial more. Frying a few relays was acceptable losses. “I’m at the front door. I notice it’s not locked.”

“We’re a little bit busy in here, sir.”

The power reserve is basically a big, rough concrete bunker wired to allow a couple of hundred high capacity industrial batteries to charge in a protected environment. Most of the important bits are down below ground level, the entrance basically lets out onto a catwalk that overlooks the batteries – and yes, catwalks are a theme in villain design and I’m no exception. They’re cheaper than building a real floor and villainy is pretty much always on a budget.

About half the catwalk was torn up, mangled and twisted until it looked more like a pretzel than a walkway. Parts of it may have been missing entirely. One of the guards was actually wrapped up in part of the mess. At the far side of the bunker I could see a ragged hole where something roughly the size of a man had torn or smashed its way through a foot of reinforced concrete. My stomach turned over once and I swallowed. I’d known Rodriguez – Samson – was absurdly strong but it looked like I’d still drastically underestimated him.

Simeon was waving to me from the control room, the sounds of sporadic gunfire and tens of thousands of dollars in electrical equipment being torn apart came up from below. I slid to a stop on the catwalk just outside the door, crouching with Simeon in the frame to avoid the bulk of the dangerous stuff flying around outside. “How do things look?”

He shook his head regretfully. “Not good. I’ve already lost touch with two of our six guards and the engineer on the control panel bolted. We’ve lost about a quarter of our reserves and the remainder is dwindling fast. I’m still not sure how he’s avoiding being electrocuted with all the wiring he’s handling but the voltage doesn’t seem to be slowing him down at all.”

“That’s disappointing and extremely odd.” I slipped my SIG out of it’s holster and checked the magazine, deliberately not analyzing what immunity to electricity might tell me about Samson’s talent. I still had no idea how it functioned other than allowing him to perform absurd feats of strength. “We’ll have to deal with him in a little more direct fashion. He took cover when I shot at him at Diversy, and again when Grappler tried the same thing at the library. Bullets must hurt him.”

“They guards are trying that but not getting very far,” Simeon said, tugging absently at the lapels of his suit jacket. Even in the middle of a dingy concrete bunker he was dressed impeccably and, in a bizarre kind of denial of his circumstances, he’d refused body armor or a weapon. That was one reason I’d asked him to stay in the most out of the way bunker, so he’d be out of the line of fire. Not my greatest success, I’ll admit.

“Are the stairs still intact?” I asked, peering through the wreckage that was the catwalk.

“Sir, with all due respect, it may be best to pull back. There’s no way to be sure bullets will actually harm him and staying here just puts you in his reach.”

“I’m not letting him wreck this place ahead of schedule, Simeon.” I gave him my best disapproving look. “It could take months or years to track down the components to finish the Thunderclap array on the black market if we don’t finish fabricating the raw materials here.”

He held up a hand and, grudgingly, I waited to hear his piece. “I understand all that. You are intent on this and I’ve long since come to accept that. But if your set on getting yourself killed I don’t see why you’d object to blowing up a building or two along the way.”

There was a clatter from behind Simeon and Hangman rolled into the control room doorway on an office chair. “Wait, what?”

I glared at Simeon. “Why is she here?”

“The engineer bolted and she has the technical know-how to keep the systems running even when someone’s ripping the guts out of them.” Simeon shrugged. “It was a logical personnel allocation.”

What he wasn’t asking was why I had a problem with something that should be so obvious. Of course someone with Hangman’s computer background would be experienced in keeping an electrical system up and running. The only reason not to want her there was because of the danger. It wasn’t like me to ignore the obvious like that and Simeon didn’t have to say it out loud for me to know he was thinking it was purely for personal reasons.

“Hey, guys,” Hangman said, interrupting my thoughts, “can we get back to the part of this conversation where we’re sitting in a building with a bomb in it?”

“Technically there’s more than one bomb and they’re not that big. Blowing up your base is an essential part of supervillainy.” I ignored the look Hangman was giving me. “Simeon I’m not losing this round. It’s mine to win, we just need to stick it out a little longer and-”

“We don’t have a little longer, sir.” In an uncharacteristically familiar gesture he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “This is your last chance to make a clean break. I’ve never understood why you wanted to become a martyr, but-”

“Yeah,” Hangman broke in, pulling Simeon back as she crowded into the doorway with us. “Care to explain that part? What is he talking about, Circuit?”

I sighed and rubbed my forehead for a minute, wondering when it was I started feeling so old. “Hangman, how much of the plan – the long-term, gambit within gambit, let’s rule the world Plan – do you think you’ve figured out?”

She kept giving me the look and I stared at her until she sighed, accepting that this was a part of how things were going to go. “Well, first you use Thunderclap to take over a city’s electronics. Then you rule it with an iron fist while driving down crime rates and using your public persona’s influence to help bring the economy into line and establish functioning social services. Then you…” Hangman hesitated for a minute, clearly to the part of the plan she hadn’t quite figured yet. “Expand, I guess. Some people will come to you willingly and others can be bullied. At some point there will probably be a direct challenge or five, but-”

“But it will never get that far. Hangman, listen to me.” I reach out as if to put a hand on her shoulder or brush the stray hair from her face. She blinked, a little uncertain, and in that moment I had her by the lapels of the jacket and pulled her close in a way that no one would mistake for affection. “You are stupidly naive and it infuriates me, because I was just like you once. So here’s the truth, unvarnished. Tyrants crumble. Alexander the Great. Julius Cesar. King John Lackland. Napoleon. Adolph Hitler. Nothing they build endured. They don’t usher in new eras, they ripped down the old ones. It was always someone who came after then who did the work of rebuilding, all they were good for was the act of destruction. All.”

Simeon grabbed me by the wrists and broke us apart. “Sir-”

“This is a contest, Hangman,” I snarled, pushing myself to my feet using the doorway as a prop. I was mad and I didn’t know why. I’d spent the last seven years piecing together these ideas and the plans that would make them real, but talking about it always seemed to make me angry. It was perhaps the one thing I’d never stopped to examine. “I tear down their lies, their projects, their secrets, until someone comes and stops me. This is where I get the ability to do whatever I want and use it to find all the liars, the cheats and the bullies out there and grind them into dust so when they finally come and finish me off there’s no more trash out there to clutter up the new order. Because sooner or later that was going to be someone like me. Maybe Lethal Injection. Maybe the Enchanter. But me – I am going to do it right. I will make them hurt like they never have before, but it will be to make them better. And when I am done and buried, they’ll be able to rebuild without any of the old crimes weighing them down.”

“You’ve made a difference, Circuit,” Hangman said, slowly reaching out to take my hand. I jerked back instinctively and she hesitated, looking hurt. “Simeon is right. You’ve shown the world Project Sumter’s lies. You have almost everything you need to build the Thunderclap array. You can step back for a while, take stock, come up with a new plan. You don’t have to-”

“Do you know what a thunderbird is?” I asked.

“What does that-”

“Do you know what it is?”

“No.” She shook her head sadly. “I don’t.”

Simeon gently laid a hand on her shoulder and said, “It’s a creature of wrath, Miss Dawson. A thunderbird’s wrath is unchecked and uncontrollable. Come. We need to go.”

I shook myself back to reality and realized I’d set my gun on the ground at some point during the exchange. I quickly scooped it back up, saying, “We can still contain this, Simeon. We’re nowhere near the endgame yet. I said it this morning – we’re winning this round.”

“Sir, I know you haven’t been paying the best attention so I’ll just tell you.” He nodded towards the edge of the catwalk. “No one’s fired a shot down there for the last ninety seconds. Now you might be able to outmatch Agent Samson with your superior maneuverability and one pistol but I doubt Hangman or I could add much to you side of the equation. And I seriously doubt you or Samson want us here.”

The worst part was, he was right. There hadn’t been gunfire for the last minute or so and I should have noticed and sent them away a long time ago. I sighed and tried to let the tension ease out of me. “You’re right. Go. I’ll see what can be done about Rodriguez.”

They’d gone a few steps down towards the door when the massive bulk of Manuel Rodriguez, full time preacher and part time government strong man, vaulted up from the ground floor and onto the wall above the catwalk, stopping himself on all fours like a human fly, except he immediately slid down and landed lightly on the catwalk. How a man his size managed to land lightly I’ll never understand.

“Actually,” he said, dusting off his pants and bulletproof vest, “before you’re on your way there is one thing that needs to be said.”

I tensed and eased the safety off my sidearm. “And what would that be, Agent Samson?”

He didn’t answer me, not directly. Instead he looked at Hangman and said, “Elizabeth Dawson. I have a message for you from your father. He wants you to come home.”

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Water Fall: Cauldron Boiling

Posted by natechen on

One Week, One Day After the Michigan Avenue Proclamation

Circuit

Hangman jerked up from her computer and yelled, “Circuit! They’re in the park!”

I slammed the updates SImeon had given me along with my morning coffee onto the table in the ops room and hurried over to her station. “Where? How did they get in?”

“They’re in the northeast quadrant, Heavy’s zone. I’m not sure how it got there without our seeing it but it looks like they brought a helicopter in.” She spun her monitor so I could see.

Sure enough there was a chopper, it’s blades spinning slowly, with a small group of a dozen or so people in a loose grouping around it. I spotted the distinctive stocky shape of Pastor Rodriguez, or Samson as they’d called him at the press conference, and nearby the leaner but equally tall man they’d called Aluchinskii Massif. He was exchanging words with a much shorter man who I guessed to be Double Helix. A few seconds later the two broke apart and the group separated into three distinct units. Helix left with two blonde women in tow, heading towards the southwest, Massif and Samson left with the bulk of the remain agents heading due south and the last two split the difference and went down the center.

“This isn’t good. I’d bet anything those two are wave makers.” I drummed my fingers impatiently on the desk. “Probably serving to relay messages between the two groups. They won’t even have communications we can knock out with the Empion grenades.” With a wave I caught the attention of one of the techs over at the maglev controls. “Switch over from the Empion launcher settings to manned flight. Then have Heavy meet me at crossroads seven.”

“Wait.” Hangman grabbed my arm as I was about to start towards the door. “Crossroads seven is between us and the big group, but Helix is headed almost straight for the dam and you’ll be nowhere near him. What if he’s trying to knock out our power supply?”

“He can’t,” I said with a grin. “Not right now. That’s the beauty of fall, Hangman. Heat sinks don’t create heat, they only rearrange what’s already there. They basically suck all the heat in an area into one central point – their heat sink. But they can only take so much heat out of the environment, once it gets cold enough they can’t pull the energy to them. For Helix, that point is roughly the freezing point of water.”

Hangman gave me a blank look for a moment, then pulled up the weather on her computer. “It’s thirty-five degrees outside.”

“Just warm enough he can effect changes, but not nearly enough to let him burn through concrete. He certainly won’t be breaking the dam with it.” I shrugged. “And even if he could, he’d have to be standing right in front of it. The water might evaporate before it could sweep him out of the way, but there’s no way he could do the same with the dam itself, even if it was the middle of summer. The rubble would crush him in an instant. Whatever he’s doing, it’s most likely a feint to cover for Sumter’s other group.”

“I see.” She toggled back to the screen displaying the drone footage. The intruders were now keeping under as much cover as possible, trying to avoid being spotted, so only glimpses of them could be made out through the brush. Hangman sighed and looked back up at me. “Stay in touch, I’ll let you know if they change directions. And be careful.”

“Careful?” I started backing towards the door, my hands spread in a helpless gesture. “If I wanted to do that, I’d have chosen a different line of work!”

Then I turned and ran out into the hallway. About twenty feet down there was a four way junction. Going straight would take you out of the bunker entirely, while turning in either direction the hall dead-ended about fifteen feet further on in a small closet containing an unusually large and strong maglev relay. I flipped my harness on with at thought at the same time I hit a switch on the wall. A two inch think steel door slid open and I flung myself up and out into the sky.

——–

Helix

“Explain to me exactly why it is you’re running off into the woods with a pair of gorgeous women?” Amplifier’s voice whispered in my ear.

“Not that,” I said, perhaps a bit too quickly.

“What?” Amplifier asked, her voice all innocence.

“Did you say something?” Frostburn asked at the same time.

I clamped down on an annoyed growl before it got too far. “Talking to Amp.”

“Got it,” the twins chorused.

My focus drifted back to an imaginary point just to my left, where I imagined Amplifier standing, even though she was probably several thousand feet away by that point, up in a tree with Hush. “Moving the three of us in a group is an integral part of this plan.”

“And I get that for the twins, since they’ve been together so long and they’ve got some secret to working together that makes them super scary.” Amp’s tone was back to frank, less playful. “But I don’t get why you’re running with them, and not the group that’s going after Circuit.”

“Because this time, we’re bringing overwhelming force. This time, there’s not going to be a clever backup plan and he’s not getting away with most of his resources intact. This time we’re hitting him with everything we’ve got.”

“And some things the National Guard’s got,” she added. “But-”

“Look, Amplifier, the dam has got to go. In order to do that safely, all three of us have to be involved. It’s as simple as that.” I turned my attention to the GPS tracker I was holding in one hand. Thankfully, Circuit either hadn’t noticed us or decided it was more important to keep his own ground level tech working than countering whatever advantages we got from the gear we’d brought along. “One mile to go, ladies,” I told the twins. “Start shifting the balance, if you would.”

Of the infinitely large number of things that comics get wrong in their depictions of super powers is the tendency to characterize people who create cold as using “cold energy” to reduce the temperature in an area is the one that annoys me the most. Perhaps that’s a very personal bias of mine, but I know for a fact that cold isn’t energy. Something that’s cold lacks energy, it’s so high up in a region’s thermal map that energy can’t pool deep enough to cover it. When cold spikes make an area cold all they’re really doing is pushing up on temperature so that the heat flows out of a region. Or, to use the simplified analogy, if heat sinks pile heat in to a specific place cold spikes throw it out of a specific place.

And when they brush the heat out it has to go somewhere.

Coldsnap and Frostburn started pushing as soon as I asked them to and all around us the air temperature plummeted as the shape of the temperature shifted. Before the excess heat could drain away into the surroundings I pressed down and captured it in a heat sink of my own. The twins weren’t making things very cold – we didn’t want to wipe out a huge swath of the park, after all – but the temperature did quickly drop down to about zero Fahrenheit. As we pushed on through the park it began to rain, then snow and our progress slowed. Since we hadn’t been moving that quickly due to the brush it took us another twenty minutes to push through the last mile to the dam.

I whispered a few words to Amp so she’d know we arrived then the twins really went to town. Circuit had built a large but kind of crude dam across the river in a natural depression there creating a natural lake that was at least four hundred feet wide and easily half a mile long. Mossburger, who was an electrical systems engineer before he joined Project Sumter, estimated that it was producing at least half the power for Circuit’s compound, possibly more. The Chain o’ Rivers park had a lot of places where a hydroelectric dam could have been built but this was the one that required the least set-up time and materials. But, by the same token, it was also the easiest to access.

The equipment that had come in and built the dam had left broken paths of foliage from the back access roads out to the construction site and those rutted roads were still easily found, if we had wanted to use them, but as it so happened we didn’t. Analysis wasn’t sure how many men Circuit had guarding his compound but odds were some of them had been detailed to watch the dam itself, as the hydroelectric production of the base was easily one of it’s most important features. So instead of approaching the dam from downriver we emerged from the woods along the shores of the newly created lake a few hundred feet upriver of the dam.

By this point I was holding a two foot wide ball of superheated air hot enough to glow with a dull red light and we were surrounded by plants that glistened with frost. Coldsnap was about sixty feet away to my left, her sister and equal distance to my right, so that I stood just outside the Venn diagram created by their overlapping cold spikes, soaking up the heat that was bleeding away from them greedily. With no trees or brush to get in the way the wind created by the unnatural differences in temperature kicked into high gear.

Then the girls decided to make it really cold.

They stepped out onto the lake, flash-freezing it from the surface all the way to the bottom. The heat rolling away from them, which had been just a trickle before, became a flood and it was suddenly all I could do to contain it. The twins, in the mean time, headed across the lake towards the dam at a quick walk, moving with total confidence on the ice. Since they’d declined the cleats I’d offered them when we were prepping for the mission I could only assume it was based on long experience. I didn’t have any such practice so I’d gone with the footgear.

Once Frostburn was within fifty feet of the dam it was my turn. I started out on the ice after them. The heat sink in my hands, now occupying a space bigger than I was, flash-melted the water under by feet and by the time I’d gone twenty feet I’d sunk into the ice so far the surface was over my head. I heard a gun shot or two but I hoped the winds would keep the shooter from hitting anything important and focused on crossing the two hundred slippery, uneven feet to the dam as quickly as possible.

I had almost melted down to the river bed when I got there. I could feel the cold spikes the twins were creating fading back towards the shoreline and quickly disappearing, so they were probably all right. But all of a sudden I was holding a six foot ball of plasma while surrounded by hundreds of cubic feet of frozen water and facing a twenty foot concrete wall. The only way out of this would be applied thermodynamics.

Hot things expand, cold things shrink. That’s basic physics. It’s what creates wind, for example. If you take an object and heat it, it will expand and push aside the things around it. When the intense heat I was holding came in contact with the dam the concrete began to groan. After a moment there was a bang and a crack ran through the dam like a bolt of lightning. I took a step back, letting some of the heat around me loose to flow back into my surroundings. Behind me, with no unnatural influence keeping it frozen, the lake began to thaw…

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Water Fall: Hydroelectric

Posted by natechen on

Six Days After the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Circuit 

I’d just turned in after another day of waiting for the shoe to drop when Wallace banged on my door. The two days after taking out a drone with an Empion grenade had been difficult, with most of us slowly getting more and more tense as we looked for signs that Project Sumter, or whichever government organization had sent that drone, was getting ready to pay us a visit. In the mean time, I’d spent a lively afternoon tramping through the underbrush and trying to track down the Empion grenade we’d used to disable the drone on it’s way over the park.

In theory, the grenades were supposed to launch off the maglev relays, shut off all extraneous systems and trip an EMP. Then, with internal circuits shielded by a bit of pirated military tech, they’d switch back on, link up with the nearest maglev relay and swing back to the holding area. Unfortunately, the switch back on part wasn’t working exactly as intended. I’d spent part of the previous evening and most of that day arguing about why it might not be working with Davis. When I wasn’t doing that, I was arguing with Heavy or Grappler over how to best set our handful of perimeter guards. Most were mercenaries with some field experience and I wanted to leave them to their own devices, but Heavy felt they’d get out of hand if we let them have too much autonomy. Worse, a few squads were gangbangers and other petty thugs Heavy had scraped together and who weren’t thrilled with taking orders from anyone, but were willing to listen to someone with enough street cred to command their respect. Eventually we compromised on Heavy leading the crooks and the mercenaries working on their own. 

When I finally got to bed I was hoping for a solid five hours sleep before something else went wrong. It was not to be. 

I yanked the door open just as Wallace was raising his hand to knock again. He blinked at me looking more than a little surprised, perhaps not used to seeing me without a shirt on. Then he rallied and said, “The eyes we’ve had on the Sumter headquarters say they dispatched a helicopter around two o’clock this afternoon. Hangman’s trying to hack in and get their flight plan, but no idea where they were headed yet.” 

“They’re probably not coming directly here,” I said, drumming my fingers on the doorframe. “This location is in the middle of a jurisdictional nightmare, they can’t have cut the red tape in a day and a half, even if all five senators on the Talented Individuals Committee rally to the cause.” 

“Well, you said to tell you as soon as they made a move, and now you’ve been told,” Wallace said with a smile. “I’m going to hit the sack.” 

“You’re awful cheerful about this,” I said dryly. 

“Other than running some checks on the last turbine in the concrete dam, I haven’t had much to do today.” He shrugged. “Lots less stress than the rest of you. Good night, Circuit.” 

I watched him head off down the dreary hallway and turned back to flip the lights on and reached for my shirt. Wallace was a very phlegmatic man and took just about everything in stride but it wouldn’t do to run around the installation shirtless and start everyone talking. And I certainly wasn’t getting much sleep with Helix on the way. Might as well get a little work done. 

——– 

Helix 

The biggest sticking point was what we would use to enter the park. Kesselman was a certified helicopter pilot and more than familiar with the EC-155s the Project used on those rare occasions we needed to be airlifted into a situation. We used that to get out to our meeting with the National Guard and we wanted to go in using it too. The Guard, on the other hand, wanted to go in using a Black Hawk, which meant we’d have to rely on them for pilots. That, in turn, would give them the leverage to insist we take Guardsmen along as tactical support, instead of our usual teams. 

Even though there wasn’t enough room on a chopper for me, Massif, Samson, Amplifier, along with our assorted oversight agents and support teams plus Darryl and his team, I would still prefer that the tactical support we did bring had experience dealing with talents on both sides of the equation. To my surprise it was HiRes, the rookie from Darryl’s team, who gave us the leverage we needed to make the Guard go along with our plan. 

We’d been in and out of meetings and teleconferences with various military honchos the whole of the previous evening and we’d pretty much figured that we’d have to wait on Washington to break the stalemate. Voorman and the team oversight agents were in yet another meeting and the rest of us were sitting in the situation room, in case our knowledge of the enemy’s talents was needed, and HiRes’ head was surrounded by the faint rainbow effect I’d come to realize meant he was using his talent to somehow see things that were far away and, on occasion, around corners. My best guess was that he was bending light somehow, which was cool and creepy at the same time. It was also something I’d never heard of before, and I had to fight the urge to pry into what he could do with it. Not knowing that kind of thing was a novel experience after twenty years of working with talents. 

For most of the morning HiRes had been glancing around a lot, like he wasn’t used to all the hustle and bustle, but now he’d settled down and was just leaning back with his eyes half lidded, watching over the shoulder of various drone operators when he wasn’t skimming classified messages as the cryptologists decoded them. 

Forstburn and Coldsnap had been keeping up a constant string of chatter the whole time, deflecting attention from him by virtue of being cheerful and pretty, and I’d been eavesdropping between fielding the occasional question about Circuit’s methods. The status quo had held for nearly half an hour before HiRes quietly murmured, “They’re using drones.” 

“They told us they were sending in another wave of drones over the park at this morning’s briefing,” I said just as softly. “Nothing new there.” 

“Circuit’s people,” he said. “They have a couple of those high altitude surveillance drones that double as a sat uplink. They think that’s how he’s spotting and shooting down our drones as they come in.” 

“Well that’s a pain.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “It sounds more and more like we’ll have to go in on foot. Jack will be thrilled. He can finally give that lecture on jungle warfare he’s been saving all this time.” 

“Assuming they don’t just give the job to the Guard,” Frostburn said. 

“Because they’re better suited for that kind of operation,” her sister added. 

“Drones are good.” HiRes’ eyes snapped fully open again and he sat up straight. “That means they’re spotting us visually and not by radar. I can make a chopper invisible but I can’t screw with radar waves.” 

“An invisible chopper.” I said, feeling my eyebrows creep towards my hairline. “That sounds too good to be true. What can go wrong here?” 

“It’s a two way street,” Coldsnap said. “When HiRes does his magic no one can see you but you can’t see anything, either. You have to rely on other senses, or leave a hole you can see out of.” 

“Your pilot should be able to fly us by instruments.” He waved his hand downwards. “And I can work it so we can see, and be seen, from the ground but not the sky. It’s all in where you choose to make the bends.” 

“I’ll assume that makes sense somehow.” I drummed my fingers on my knee. He was definitely bending light. Interesting. “Other potential disasters? Things the Guard might say to try and keep us from using this route?” 

“The public parts of the park have a PA system,” Frostburn said. “It wouldn’t be that hard to rewire it so it could listen, too. It’d be a cheap way to monitor those parts of the park and make sure we weren’t slipping through the underbrush. There might be listening stations all over the place by now. What if they hear us coming?” 

I laughed. “Don’t you have the silent man on your team?” 

“There’s a limit to how loud a sound can get before he can’t squash it anymore.” She tilted her head to one side, meaning she’d just thought of something. “Unless…” 

“Unless we have two wave makers working on it.” I pointed at HiRes. “Find Amplifier and Hush, get them together and see if it’s possible. I have a phone call to make.” 

I left the three of them to run errands and started looking for a quiet corner of the base, already scrolling through my contacts list for the number of a certain Senator who had just as much at stake in this case as I did. 

——– 

Circuit 

Wallace and Davis came to me late the next morning, neither one looking particularly well rested. I gave Wallace a rueful look and said, “I thought you were under no stress?” 

“I had an idea after talking to you last night,” he said with a shrug. “I wanted to see how practical it was so I checked with Davis. We were up most of the night getting the numbers crunched and some rough plans put together.” 

I suppressed a yawn and took a gulp of my coffee. “What kind of an idea are we talking about?” 

“One that will get us out of here by three tomorrow afternoon.” Davis handed me a sheaf of papers covered in sketches and notes. “Your plans call for us to make all our superconducting material and shape it into electromagnets here at Chainfall. But, with a few adjustments, we can turn CPC wire into magnets at Deepwoods, meaning can focus the hydroelectric capacity of here at Chainfall on manufacturing the superconductors. That cuts the time we have to stay here almost in half.” 

I glanced up from the plans he’d handed me. “Deepwoods?” 

“That’s what Hangman’s been calling the place up in Wisconson,” Wallace said. 

“I see.” I went back to the papers and said, “This looks feasible. Make the changes here as soon as possible. Davis, I want you to take all the completed materials we have at the end of the day and return to the northern installation and begin prepping it according to these spects.” 

“Just me?” He asked. 

“I need Wallace here to help me finish checking over the second hydroelectric turbine in the permanent dam.” I set the plans aside and stood up from my desk. “We’ve had drone overflights most of the morning and I was busy shooting them down. Once we get that second turbine working we’ll have enough electricity to keep a blanket of Empion mines airborne for half an hour, more than long enough to knock down anything that can come to us through the air. That means Sumter, or whoever winds up coming after us here, will have to come by ground.” 

“And by the time they can cut through the paperwork to do that we’ll be long gone,” Davis said with a smile. 

“Good work, boys,” I said with a smile. “As long as we keep the hydroelectric turbines intact I think it’s safe to say we’ve won this round.” 

“You make it sound like you expect to loose one of these days,” Davis said with a laugh. 

Wallace and I laughed too, but in the back of my mind the Thunderbird gambit gnawed on my conscience. Davis was uncomfortably close to the truth for once. Hopefully he, or worse Wallace or Hangman, wouldn’t see through to the endgame until it was time. 

But first there was Thunderclap. And before that, we’d have to keep the hydroelectric generators going for the next twenty-four hours. Simple enough, right? 

——– 

Helix 

A week and a day after the event the press had started calling the Michigan Avenue Proclamation we were flying low over the marshy forest that held Circuit’s latest supervillain’s lair. The Guard wasn’t happy about it, but the ability to put an invisible helicopter in the middle of the opposition’s base had tipped the turf war in our favor and we were going in to sort things out. 

As for flying invisible, it was really weird. If you looked up there was nothing visible but a nauseating pulse of twisted light over the chopper while the Indiana countryside continued to roll by undisturbed below us. On top of that, the combined efforts of Amplifier and Hush were suppressing most of the noise we were making, so the helicopter’s engines were making no more noise than the typical house fan. This also meant that if you wanted to say anything to anyone you had to yell at the top of your lungs, and even then our wave makers were pretty upset about it. 

But thankfully we made it safely to the landing zone in the northern part of the park, about two miles away from what our drone reconnaissance suggested was the center of Circuit’s clandestine instillation. It wasn’t really anything more than a small, level clearing well removed from the public areas of the park and all of Circuit’s territory that we could identify. It was really quite impressive the way he’d managed to smuggle enough materials and labor into the park to build three hardened bunkers and one smallish dam. There was probably an inside man in the DNR or something, Analysis and Records were going to spend months working out how it might have been done, but in the mean time it meant that we had a lot of work to do. 

Grandpa Wake used to tell stories about jumping huge distances, like the time he vaulted off a three story building onto a Panzer Mk. IV to bend the main gun out of shape. I’ll admit that I had a sneaking suspicion those stories were hyperbole, at least until Samson jumped twenty feet from the chopper to the ground and proceeded to secure our landing zone like nothing unusual had happened. Kesselman put us down without incident and the rest of us piled out in a less spectacular fashion. 

I glanced around and suppressed a slight shudder. The group included Teresa and the rest of our team, Massif and Screeton, Amplifier, Sanders, Darryl and his team and Sampson. In all, there were eight talents present, twice as many as I had ever seen in one place outside of a briefing room. “All right people,” I said, rubbing my hands together. “You all have your assignments. Circuit’s had his chance to make history. Let’s show him how to do it right.” 

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Water Fall: Breaking the Levy

Posted by natechen on

Three Days After the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Circuit

After all the prep, the pursuit and the press, I’d finally achieved a lifelong dream: Exposing the existence of unusual talents to the world at large. Naturally, once we’d shaken off pursuit I decided to repair to my evil villain’s lair and plot my next diabolical move. Also, since the place had been under construction for nearly a year and I hadn’t visited in three weeks, there were a lot of things to check up on. Being a conscientious evil mastermind I immediately set out to bring myself up to date in a fashion most likely to be unpleasant for all involved. Which is to say, I scheduled a meeting.

There were no donuts involved.

And, since it was my meeting, I dispensed with an agenda and skipped straight to the questions. “Status of the maglev relays?”

Davis waved his hand over the northern section of the map of the Chainfall site we were gathered around. “The last quadrant has the system fully installed and connected, but the reserves aren’t charged yet. You can only expect fifteen to twenty minutes of use right now. We won’t have the full hour and a half of reserves until tomorrow afternoon.”

I nodded. “That’s acceptable. What about the Empion grenades and their launchers?”

“They’re all up and running,” Wallace said, rapping his knuckles on the table and sending pens and pencils jumping. “You have full coverage of the base and we’ve done a couple of test detonations. We don’t know how well they handle, since the maglev system works best in your hands, but the basic principles are sound.”

“That leads us to the ground situation.” I glanced at Heavy and Grappler. “How prepared are we?”

Heavy laughed. “You know us, boss. We got flypaper and glue out everywhere you want it and a couple of places you didn’t think of. But the guys you got here? They ain’t pros. Not like the Army, not like the cops. When the hammer comes down, they’re only gonna buy you so much time.”

“Not to worry,” I said with a half smile. “Chainfall isn’t a permanent site, it’s just a temporary production facility.”

“Which raises the question,” Davis said, “of what, exactly, you need that would require you invest almost fifteen million dollars of time, effort and material in building this site.”

“Only fifteen million?” Hangman asked, glancing at Davis.

“You save a lot when you don’t need permits, zoning adjustments, board of health and safety inspections and the architect does the work free of charge,” Wallace said.

“The answer,” I said, a bit louder than the byplay going on, “is this.”

I took a small stretch of bronze colored wire out of a box that sat on one side of the table and set it on top of the map. It was about the thickness of the wide rice noodles you find in Chinese cooking, coiled into the rough shape of an electromagnet. For a moment the rest studied it, as if there was some great significance hidden in its coils. Which there was, although I could tell from their expressions they didn’t know what it was.

Finally Wallace said, “We’re making copper wire?”

“Not copper,” I said. “Cuprate-perovskite ceramic wire.”

Davis made a sound somewhere between a whimper and a squeal of glee and snatched the coil up to inspect it more closely. “A high temperature superconductor. And you made this here?”

“For a quarter the cost buying it on the open market, to say nothing of the cost of buying it through the black market. Assuming there was even enough of the stuff in the world to meet our needs.” I folded my arms over my chest and turned my smile up to full strength. “Worth those fifteen millions to you, Davis?”

Hangman waved her hand a bit to catch our attention then asked, “Excuse me if I scroll back a bit, but, what’s so special about this cupping ceramics?”

“It’s cuprate-perovskite ceramic, and when-”

Letting Davis try and explain would take all day so I jumped in and intercepted before he could work up too much of a head of steam. “Let’s just call them CPCs and say the short answer is, they can function as superconductors without having to be frozen all the way down to near absolute zero.”

Her eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Room temperature superconductors?”

“Liquid nitrogen baths are still required,” I said. “The phrase ‘high temperature’ is extremely relative in this case.”

“Ah. I see.”

“But if we’re going to finalize the Thunderclap array,” I continued, “Davis is going to require a great deal of CPC electromagnetic coils. We’ve known that for more than five years, thus the necessity of adding the Chainfall operation to our long term strategy.”

“The what?” Heavy asked, sounding a little confused.

I glanced at my senior engineer, who was still studying the coil with something approaching reverence. “Mr. Davis? Would you care to explain the purpose behind that invaluable piece of wire you’re holding?”

“I would be delighted,” he said, slowly lifting the coil up until it was at his eye level and rotating it for the whole table to see. A few of the other hands in the ops room glanced over from their monitors to see what there was to see but, for the most part, the people Simeon had found to staff Chainfall were maintaining a professional interesting in their equipment. Just as well. Davis, oblivious to the interest or apathy of his surroundings, went on. “A superconductor has a number of unique properties but, from the moment I was hired, Circuit and I have only been interested in the way they can hold current for a near infinite length of time.”

“You mean it’s like a battery that never runs out?” Grappler asked, sounding interested in the conversation for the first time.

“More like a flashlight that doesn’t actually use any electricity,” Davis said. “It took a year of research to determine the best way to exploit that. It all ultimately hinges on the fact that electricity and magnetism are the same thing.”

“Right,” Heavy said, nodding. “Even I get that much. With a the maghand the boss can reach out and flip switches or mess with power lines he’s not touching. Why’s the superconductingness of the magnet make a difference?”

“Because the nature of a superconductor is such that a fusebox like Circuit can tweak the resistance just enough to get slightly different shapes of magnetic fields.” Davis quickly but gently set the electromagnet coil back down on the table while continuing to talk and motion with his other hand. “Before you ask, that means one electromagnet, cooled to superconductivity and attached to the right computer equipment, can do triple duty, serving as a ‘maghand’, as you call it, a maglev relay and a lightning funnel all at once. Put enough of them in a city and a fusebox at the center and you know what you get?”

“Anything you want,” I said. “This is the age of information, and CPC superconductors are the secret to exploiting it. Hijacking any security system, manipulating traffic flow, shorting out substations and using the resulting current both offensively and defensively via the lighting funnel effect, it’s all possible once we have the tech in place. And that’s just scratching the surface.”

“Which is swell and all,” Hangman said, “but kind of raises the question, where are you going to install this Thunderclap array? I know you have property holdings all over the nation but a magnet that size isn’t going to cover a whole city block. Will it?”

“One of the bright sides of using superconductors is that they use so little current to keep running, so even a small coil like this will make a bigger magnetic field than you might think.” I picked up the wire and tucked it back into it’s box. “But that was just a test product. The real things will be several times bigger and should cover at least a half a dozen city blocks.”

“Again,” Hangman countered, “You don’t have the real estate to make that practical. What are you going to do with all-”

“Hangman, my dear, you underestimate Simeon’s ability to play the great game.” I pulled two sheets of paper, folded into thirds, from my jacket’s inner pocket and slid them across the table to Wallace. “Three years ago I left the country in order to set up a financial network in southern Europe and northern Africa. The incredible mineral resources of Africa, in particular, were of interest to me as a place to acquire the raw material to build the Thunderclap array, but Germany and Spain both served as conduits to funnel money back through dummy corporations and silent partners, some of whom aren’t even aware of what they’re investing in. When you run it all together we have more than enough access to turn not one but three cities into test sites for Thunderclap.”

“Always good to have options,” Wallace said, picking up the papers and flipping them open. “But I assume you already have your heart set on one?”

I nodded in confirmation. “The others serve to distract Project Sumter and, as you say, provide us with fallback sites if the first implementation doesn’t go well.”

As he read the first sheet of paper Wallace’s eyebrows rose until the practically touched his hairline, which takes some doing when it’s receded that far. “You’re setting this up in your own back yard?”

“Talented people exist in the public eye now,” I said, holding up half a dozen newspapers from across the country with front page stories on the subject. After my initial interview revealing our existence it sounded like most publications had more than one person in their local community volunteering to give an interview of their own, complete with demonstrations and, in one case, a fanciful costume to protect their identity and cause unfortunate misconceptions. All in all, it was about as expected. “Sooner or later, and I suspect it will be sooner, Project Sumter is going to put itself forward and try and assert control. But they’ll lack credibility and trust from the public, most secretive government branches do. After they flail about for a while, we can step in and pick up the pieces. And what better place to do it than right under the nose of one of their biggest offices? Plus, the fact that we’re operating in the same city we chose to reveal ourselves in will emphasize that we’re confident and in control.”

Glances passed back and forth around the table, and I saw one or two skeptical expressions warming to cautious enthusiasm. Heavy actually laughed and said, “Ballsy, boss. I like it.”

I offered a slight bow from the waist, then said, “Any other questions?”

And of course Davis had one. “How long?”

“Before we’re ready to use the array? Maybe a year. Six months if all goes smoothly.”

“Not what I was asking.” He leaned forward and gave me a hard look. “I just remembered that the method we devised for manufacturing cupra – excuse me, CPC materials involved the direct involvement of a fusebox. You were supposed to hire three for the occasion.”

Grappler saw where this was going quickly. “But one of them got arrested in that arms sting that went down while the rest of us were out around the country. So now we got two.” She glanced at me. “Unless you’re filling in?”

Wallace shook his head. “Not a good idea. A lot of our defenses only work at top efficiency if there’s a fusebox at the controls. For example, the maglev system can only throw an Empion grenade straight up, if we want to actually get a target in range of it’s pulse we’re going to have to be able to move it horizontally as well as vertically, and for that we need Circuit. And it’s less likely to work if he’s exhausted after spending a bunch of time fabricating electromagnets.”

Davis scowled. “I said in the past that making too much of your stuff dependent on your talent-”

“Relax, people,” I said, making a hushing gesture. “We’ll just have to make some concessions to the timetable. I had originally hoped to have things done in five or six days with our three other fuseboxes working around the clock. As it is, we’re probably looking at a week to ten days. Hangman? How long until we’re likely to be spotted?”

She spared me an arch glance, then turned her attention back to her laptop. “The next satellite overflight will be in one hour and sixteen minutes. I don’t know how many passes it will take for them to actually notice that dam you’re building outside, but I’m guessing it won’t be that many. The whole country’s probably on alert at this point.”

“Every second counts,” I said, running numbers in my head. “Wallace, that means you should be able to grab the first batch of finished CPC coils and head back to the city with them before anyone is paying attention. Use the Chinatown safehouse and start building the array based on the blueprints I gave you. There’s a list of preliminary locations to install them at as well. See Simeon before you leave, he’ll provide you with documentation on what kinds of cover stories to use.”

“Just as a helpful reminder, I did live in town for several years,” Wallace said. “There’s a chance someone’s going to know who I am. Might raise questions.”

“An acceptable risk, at this point. Anyone have a point they’d like to raise, now is the time.” I glanced around the table but no one looked like they had anything to add. “In that case, get settled and stay sharp. It all comes down to how the other side reacts now.”

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Original Art: Circuit Over Michigan Avenue

Posted by natechen on

Time for another display of original art! If you’ve been following Water Fall at all you know that the Michigan Avenue Proclamation is a major plot point. If you’ve ever wondered what that looked like, wonder no longer, for the answer is here!

michiganavenue

The composition here isn’t everything I wanted it to be. The black/gray/white ratios aren’t everything I could want. I painted the concrete display case black hoping that would make the image pop better but, in the end, it’s not all I hoped. I thought about adding some tone to the background, but I was worried that would muddy the image more. Still, here it is, hope you enjoy.

Water Fall: Still Waters

Posted by natechen on

The Day After the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Circuit

“This is not an exclusive interview, you understand,” I said, settling into the chair across from Terrance Martin.

“Exclusive?” Martin laughed bitterly as he shook his head and plunked his phone down between us hard enough to make me wonder if he’d need a new one. Then he slid his own chair a bit close to the table and adjusted his bulk so it sat more comfortably. “I’ve never heard of anyone blackmailing a reporter into interviewing him. Why should any other part of the interview be normal?”

“An excellent attitude to take, Mr. Martin.” I took my hat off and set it on the table beside me in an effort to be polite, although the scarf that hid my face would have to stay. Beside me Heavy Water took a chair of his own. We’d both dressed down a bit for this meeting, he went with a simple hoodie and jeans, with the hood up and a turtleneck with the neck unrolled and pulled up to hide most of his face. In addition to my scarf, I was wearing a beige overcoat and knee high waterproof boots that would conceal everything I was wearing underneath.

“I don’t know who you people are, but you look ridiculous,” he added, sitting back in his chair and glancing around the echoing lobby of the Circle Centre. There weren’t a lot of people there, by shopping mall standards, but there were still enough to create a lot of background noise. “But not as ridiculous as meeting here. I’m going to have a hard time hearing you on the recording.”

“I’m sure this interview will be memorable enough that you won’t need to consult your notes too closely.” I smiled, even though he couldn’t see it. “We’re making history, after all.”

“I’m a sports writer,” he said skeptically. “The only history I write happens on the playing field.”

“I’m well aware of your specialty,” I said with a smile. “But we did choose you for a reason and, trust me, once word of other events comes out your editor will want a part of this.”

Martin gave Heavy a skeptical look. “This guy okay?”

If he’d been expecting some kind of ethnic sympathy from Heavy he was in for a disappointment. Any shared experiences they had as African Americans were more than overwritten by hidden talent, criminal background and blood relation to a serial killer. Heavy just grunted and said, “You’d be surprised. We have something to show you.”

With that much preamble and no more, Heavy picked up Martin’s cup of coffee, popped the lid off and reached in. A second later he quickly dumped a shiny, viscous blob of steaming coffee out on the table where it trembled a bit like the world’s most bitter tasting blob of jelly. Martin jerked back with a yelp, perhaps to avoid getting scalded, then leaned back in for a closer look.

Heavy let the coffee sit there for a moment then reached out and flicked the blob with a single finger, returning the liquid to normal viscosity. It burst almost like a bubble sending coffee rushing out in all directions and causing the reporter to jerk back again, cursing this time. I grabbed some napkins and casually dropped them on the brown mess on the table, then said, “Pretty little trick, don’t you think?”

The reporter glared at Heavy. “What did you do?”

“I altered the viscosity of your coffee until it was closer to glue than caffeine,” Heavy said with a shrug. “Then I put it back to normal. Splash.”

“You…” Martin’s face scrunched up, probably reviewing high school physics that he hadn’t had to use in decades. “How is that possible?”

“Modern science tells us what’s happening, but not the mechanism by which it is accomplished. Another example.” I held my hand out palm up over the table. With a flex of my fingers I sent electricity arcing through my fingers like it was a miniature Jacob’s Ladder. It was a modification, or actually the original incarnation of, my taser rig. It wasn’t really much more than a parlor trick but in this case that was exactly what I wanted. “What you are seeing is called an unusual talent.”

He switched his attention from the sparks crawling down my hand back to me. “Seriously?”

“That’s the official term.” I snapped the current off and closed my hand. “We chose to talk to you, in part, because you’re used to seeing people with exceptional abilities.”

“Whoa. Hold up.” Martin leaned back and put his hands between us like he was trying to push me away. “There’s a huge difference between being a good athlete and having…” He gestured at my hand. “Some kind of superpowers.”

“Not a superpower,” I said quickly. “An unusual talent. We can do one thing you can’t. We’re not comic book characters. We’re real people, just like you.”

Our interviewer gave us a skeptical look. “Who hide your faces and blackmail people like you’re cut-rate villains.”

“Look, we can go back and for over this all day our you can listen to his point,” Heavy said, leaning forward just enough to make it clear he wasn’t making a request. “This isn’t about us having a couple of sweet tricks up our sleeves, it’s about equality.”

“Really?” He still looked and sounded skeptical. “How so? Your friend looks pretty well off to me.”

“Money isn’t the central issue.” I drummed my fingers on the tabletop for a second. Heavy had jumped ahead in our script but, given the direction things had been going, that was actually a good choice. Best to stick with him and catch the rest later. “Have you ever heard of people like us before? I mean outside of Greek myth or movies something like that.”

“No…” Martin said slowly. “But there are good reasons for you people to stay hidden, right?”

“Such as?”

“Well, wouldn’t you be worried about getting outed?”

“Worried about what?” I asked, keeping my tone casual. “Persecution by others? Do you realize how difficult it is for us to stay hidden?”

The reporter’s brow furrowed. “I don’t follow.”

“Think about it.” I rested an elbow on the table, careful to avoid the mess Heavy had made, and leaned in, lowering my voice and prompting Martin to match my posture to hear better. “Life isn’t like fiction. We don’t magically develop our talents in adolescence. It’s much less like athletic ability and much more like perfect pitch in that respect. Ninety nine percent of the time there’s no way to keep family members or close friends from knowing. Then there’s the shrewd folks who notice their friends always have something weird happening around them. And that doesn’t even begin to take into account the cops who have one to many strange things happen to them, the conspiracy theorists who are in the right place at the right time-”

“Wait, wait, wait.” Martin waved his had to cut me off. “Exactly how many people know about you talented folks?”

“The official government estimates, made during the 2000 Census, are that about 1 in 25 people are either talented themselves, or know someone who is. Don’t ask how they reached that conclusion, the math is kind of complicated.”

“Right. I don’t care anyways.” He shook his head. “What I want to know is, how do you guys even stay secret?”

“Ah. Well.” I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling. That wasn’t in the script, but it was a good question. “It’s actually a combination of two things. Most fiction would have you believe that people pass off anything they see and don’t understand as hallucinations or something similar, they simply won’t believe anything that doesn’t fit with their way of looking at the world.”

“I notice that you don’t seem worried about that,” Martin said.

“Because it’s just not true. People want there to be fantastic abilities, that’s why there’s a million stories about people who have them – well, that and the fact we’re real and there’s at least a cultural memory of our existence.” I glanced down at the reporter and gave him the hardest look I could manage. It’s actually quite good even when you can only see half my face, I know because I practice with a mirror from time to time. “People keep the secret out of fear.”

“Fear of what?” Martin asked incredulously. “You have crazy superpowers, what’s there to be afraid of?”

“Don’t get it wrong,” Heavy said. “We can mess with a couple of laws of nature, sure, but that doesn’t mean we’re invincible. I’ve been laid up for months after getting shot. Maybe there’s one or two guys who can bounce bullets out there but, as far as I know, that’s all they can do. There’s plenty to be afraid of.”

I drummed my fingers to grab and keep Martin’s attention. “What you don’t seem to understand is, most of us don’t know just how common talented people are. So even if one of us should see some sign that another person might have a talent of their own we keep quiet. And if your son could juggle electricity and you met another man who you saw doing the same, would you approach him? What would you say when he asked you how you realized what he could do? What if he saw your son as some kind of rival?”

“I get the picture.” He gave us a meaningful look. “Not everyone with your talents is a nice person.”

“Funny, coming from you. But it’s much worse than that.” I leaned forward again and said in a softer tone, “The government doesn’t want people to know about us.  That’s the other thing that keeps us secret. We can’t use our talents for our own profit, in fact we’re not supposed to use them at all unless we’re employed by the government. We’re hounded when we do, and we can even go to jail. They’re careful to keep it all neat and kosher looking, but the real purpose is to make sure we never become known to the general public.”

Martin frowned. “I’m guessing they don’t want to cause a panic or riots or hate crimes or something like that?”

“That’s the idea,” Heavy said. “But tell me, has that ever worked? In this country or anywhere else?”

I picked up the line of thought smoothly, glad to be back to something resembling our script. “A fundamental part of our identity is being repressed right now. Significant contributions we could be making with our unique abilities are being prevented, or kept strictly in the hands of the government, supposedly for our own safety. But who does it really benefit? Project Sumter, the government’s organization for controlling talents, has the monopoly on talents who are well educated on what they can do and how they can do it safely. They use it to conduct surveillance and enforce laws in ways no one else can match.”

“One out of ten of known talents dies in accidents resulting because they don’t understand what they can do,” Heavy added. “By keeping that information to themselves The Man makes himself partly responsible for those deaths.”

Martin’s eyes widened slightly, then his skeptical expression was back in force. “Okay, that does sound bad. But any numbers you produce to support that are going to be a case of your word versus the government’s. And what do you think running a story in a newspaper is going to do about it? The Indianapolis Star isn’t even a big paper.”

“It wouldn’t be that big a help, if that’s all we did,” I said with a shrug. “You’ve seen the kind of long term differences movements that were all protest and no plan have made. Fortunately, we have something of a little more substance. We’ve already proclaimed our intention not to suffer second class citizenship in silence any longer. Now we’re beginning to act. What we need is to reach out to likeminded people, get in touch with them. A little activist journalism could go a long way in that regard.”

Marin nodded. “I could see that. Okay, what do you want to say to our readers about your intentions?”

“For now, just that we want equality, no different than anyone else in America. We’re willing to do what we need to in order to get it. You can call me Open Circuit, that was given to me by the government but it’s a name I’m not afraid to use as I stand up to them. I’m the nominal leader of our movement right now. There will be further demonstrations of what we can do with our unique talents and how we can use them to address our national problems in the coming weeks. In the mean time, we need other talents to come out of hiding and normal people to start demanding answers from the government.”

“What about this Project Sumter that you say manages your people?”

“Very hush hush,” I said, spreading my hands. “I don’t know all that much about it, other than that it is a government agency and it answers to a Senate committee chaired by Senator Brahms Dawson of Wisconsin.”

A grin broke out on Martin’s face. “Oh, really?”

“Someone to talk to when you start fact checking,” I said, letting a smile creep into my voice.

“That it is.” He reached out to pick up his phone then hesitated. “Anything else you’d like to add?”

“Not right now.” I raised an eyebrow. “Do you think your editor will want to run the story?”

“He might be persuaded,” Martin said, picking up his phone and tapping at the screen for a moment. He hesitated as he started to put it a way and gave me a nervous look. “Does it make a difference about that other thing?”

I placed a USB stick on the table between us. “This is the only existing copy of the security camera footage. It’s all yours. No repercussions even if your editor doesn’t run the story. But I don’t think that will be his decision.”

“You’re probably right,” Martin said, scooping up the stick and tucking it away. “If you want another interview just call me. I’m pretty sure we can work something out easier next time.”

“A pleasure,” I said. But Martin was already hurrying off, dialing frantically on his phone.

——–

“Was that really the only copy of the camera film?” Heavy asked, tossing his hoodie onto the bathroom sink and rolling down his shirt collar.

“It was,” I said, winding my scarf up carefully and setting it next to my coat and hat. In half an hour some enterprising soul would be pawning them or perhaps just adding them to their personal wardrobe. They no longer served any purpose for the two of us. “It was a hit and run, Heavy. Martin was well past the statute of limitations on those and, even if he wasn’t, it was a drug dealer he killed.”

“A sixteen year old drug dealer,” Heavy pointed out.

“Granted. But the chances of his being prosecuted would be small, particularly based on footage from a low quality, unmanned security camera on a warehouse that just happens to be owned by a wanted fugitive.” I unhooked the Jacob’s Ladder glove I was wearing and tucked it into the pocket of a light windbreaker I’d stuffed into the pocket of my long coat, then rolled down the sleeve of my shirt.

Heavy wasn’t planning on wearing a jacket. Between his beat-up turtleneck and my ratty flannel shirt and windbreaker we now looked like a couple of worn out blue collar workers getting off of third shift and heading home for the day. Except instead of looking tired, Heavy looked mad. “It’s not right. Kids like him get out there, slinging drugs on corners because they got nothing else.”

“I know it, Heavy.” I shrugged into the windbreaker and left the front open. “Society owed that boy something better and what it gave him was the front bumper of Terrance Martin’s car. And he didn’t even have the guts to stay there until someone could come and take the kid’s body away. Trust me, just because the world’s forgotten that kid doesn’t mean I have. We can’t afford to discredit him right now, but once Martin’s usefulness is over we’ll be in a position to do something about that.”

“You’re gonna use him and loose him, huh?”

I sighed. “That’s the world we live in, Heavy.”

“At least you’re trying for the right thing.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and slumped his shoulders, starting to look more like the exhausted, overworked manual laborers we were supposed to be. “I guess you can’t let it get to you.”

“And yet it still does,” I muttered under my breath, heading towards the restroom door. “But one day we’ll change that. One day very soon…”

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Water Fall: Sprouting Leaks

Posted by natechen on

20 Minutes After the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Circuit

“Everybody pile in!” Heavy slung himself into the driver’s seat of the van with a manic glee that he only really demonstrated when he was getting away from a job that had gotten his blood moving.

I climbed into the back next to Hangman, who was already ensconced at one of the consoles and bringing her laptop out of sleep mode. “Satellite coverage is back, Circuit. They’ve been back for almost ten minutes, actually, but I figured that wouldn’t matter while we were on the subway.”

“Let’s hope you’re right.” Grappler gave Heavy a meaningful look and he sighed and moved over to the passenger seat. She slid into the driver’s seat and glanced back at us. “We’re leaving.”

“Wait.” I reached over Hangman’s shoulder and twitched the console itself to life, pulling up the traffic monitoring program. “Take route four.”

“Clear traffic?”

“Heavy traffic,” I corrected. “But not too heavy.”

Grappler sighed. “If you say so.”

There was no use going over the theory again. I’d told Grappler before that a route with more traffic would get less scrutiny and would let us go farther without detection so long as no one was actively tracking us. If we were the only full-sized white van on a road there was a chance someone might get suspicious. That might sound ludicrous to a normal person but I’ve seen the kinds of things Sumter analysts come up with – and the higher ups act on. Sometimes I wonder if they use a dartboard as part of their analysis procedures. Part of it might be familiarity with the target, I’m sure Helix’s team has a handbook on recognizing my operations at this point, but some of it has got to be simple brilliance. I don’t believe in luck.

As with all brilliance that doesn’t answer to me, I find it very annoying.

Even worse, in this case my caution was all for nothing. Taking a route with moderate traffic was only a valid tactic if we hadn’t been noticed and it turned out that we had.

They let us get out onto the highway before showing their hand. In Grappler’s defense, our being tracked was not the fault of poor driving or spotting on her part. I’m pretty sure the man who came after us had been maneuvering along the rooftops before dropping down a few stories to land on the barrier running alongside the overpass we’d taken. That’s right, he wasn’t tailing us in a vehicle. He was on foot.

The man was good, landing right beside us and balancing on top of the concrete barrier like it was as wide as a sidewalk and not just a few inches across. He was covering at least twenty feet a stride and ran with the easy, energy saving gait of a marathon runner. Hangman spotted him first and yelped, which attracted everyone else’s attention. I’d never been in a car chase where the one doing the chasing was on foot but there is a first time for everything.

Ever the practical one, Grappler asked, “Who is that?”

“Sumter agent, I would assume,” I said thoughtfully. “Don’t ask me how he found us.”

“He’s got style,” Heavy said, admiring the man’s dreadlocks with an appraising air.

The agent looked like an African-American man who had actually come from that continent himself, he was all wiry muscle with a hard, angular face and the remorseful expression of someone who had seen to much. The starched shirt, slacks and tie didn’t look quite right on him, like he wasn’t used to dressing that way, and I suspected he’d started the day with a jacket that he’d shed when things got serious. From the way he looked at us, he wasn’t any happier being there than I was to see him. I wondered for a moment if this was his first assignment.

“We gonna try and ditch him?” Grappler asked.

“I’m not sure I see how,” I said. “Unless you can think of a way to run him off the road when he’s on top of a traffic obstacle.”

Heavy looked back at me. “Hand me the serious firepower?”

“I thought you were hoping to recruit some Sumter agents as the core for your new law enforcement agencies,” Hangman said, looking at me. “That’ll be harder if you shoot them first.”

The agent outside suddenly made a leap across all four lanes of traffic to land on the barriers between our lanes and traffic going the other way. Several cars swerved, two hit each other, and traffic began to slow down. I muttered a curse. “They’re not trying to hide anymore. The rules have changed.”

“Isn’t that what you wanted?” Grappler asked, incredulous.

“Of course.” I kicked the weapons locker open and passed an automatic shotgun up to Heavy. “But I didn’t think Sumter would realize what was going on so fast. Take him down. We have to survive this encounter before we can worry about anything else.”

“Right you are.” Heavy took the weapon and ran a quick check on it.

The agent outside had jumped the highway a couple more times and most of the cars around us were slowing to a stop. Some people were taking pictures or video with phones. We were driving alone now and stood out despite my best efforts. With that done dreadlocks hopped the center barrier to the others side. A moment later the whole thing jumped a few feet forward and then swung out across two of the lanes in front of us.

Grappler swerved, cursing, and took us towards the off ramp.

“No!” I yelled, realizing what was going on. “They’re herding us!”

“Then we’ll have to be herded,” Grappler growled, wrestling with the steering wheel in an effort to keep us from driving off the ramp. “I couldn’t get back into the outbound lanes without tipping this top-heavy piece of crap.”

As we spun down the ramp, brakes squealing and tires smoking, Heavy took the safety off his weapon, rolled down his window and leaned out, a manic grin on his face. “I got this, boss!”

He fired twice, although I couldn’t see how effective his shots were, and then leaned back in, a frown on his face. “I think I got him. But he’d slowed down a bunch already, maybe he’s just getting tired.”

“Probably something to do with how his talent works,” I said. “Unfortunately, I’m not sure what that might be. Hangman?”

“Never heard of anything like it,” she said. “Shouldn’t we be more worried about the other shoe dropping?”

Grappler brought us off the exit ramp at a speed not conductive to safety, ran a red light and threw us up onto a sidewalk to dodge slower moving traffic. I mentally crossed salvaging this vehicle off of the priority list as it was becoming less and less likely. Aloud I said, “Excellent point. Anyone have any guesses?”

“Put you window up, Heavy, it’s cold out there,” Grappler muttered, her eyes glued to the road.

Heavy started to oblige when Hangman said, “Oh dear.”

“What?” Heavy and I asked in unison.

She ignored us in favor of poking her laptop for a moment. “It’s getting colder outside, Circuit. And only a few blocks ahead of us.”

I felt a sinking feeling in my gut as I came to the same conclusion she’d no doubt reached – there was a heat sink up ahead. “Where’s the hot spot?”

She frowned for a moment as she studied the screen, then gave me a panicked look. “I don’t see one, Circuit. How’s that possible?”

It meant a cold spike, but I didn’t have time to explain how the two were actually opposite uses of the same ability. “It means we have a chance. I don’t think Helix could spike over such a large area.” I thumped the back of Grappler’s chair, causing her to serve us back into traffic. “Can we-”

“You trying to kill us?”

“No,” I said, scanning ahead to try and pick out the cold spike up ahead. “Can we get into one of the side streets in the next few blocks?”

A quick sweep of traffic and positioning. “No.”

“Can you drive us across icy pavement at this speed?”

“That all you need?” It was her turn to grin manically. “Child’s play.”

Somehow we’d managed to slow from highway speeds to a more sedate forty miles an hour without wrecking our vehicle or anyone else’s. Apparently working under the logic that they wouldn’t expect it Grappler decided that now was a good time to speed up again and floored the accelerator.

Then the voice of Morgan Freeman thundered over the street, screaming, “Break!” loud enough to break windows, shake buildings and, most importantly, shatter concrete that had been frozen far colder than could have ever happened in nature. Making us spin out on a frozen road had never been the idea, it had simply been to ready the pavement. Grappler swore like a sailor, throwing the van into a hard swerve, much harder than would have been possible if she hadn’t been tweaking the friction between tires and road to ensure that we didn’t spin out or roll, but even that wouldn’t be enough to keep us from hitting the rubble of the ruined sidewalk and probably going to an untimely end.

But when it comes to getaways, Grappler is the best and I never really should have doubted her skills. Wall walkers can alter friction on a surface in either direction and, as far as she was concerned, the van was a single surface. And Sumter’s agents had made a critical error – they’d only frozen and shattered the road, not the sidewalks.

Grappler hopped the van back up on the curb and expertly slid it along the side of the apartment building there, keeping friction along the van’s surface so low that there was little drag to speak of. We bounced along the sidewalk while loosing little in the way of momentum and avoiding the worst of the rubble.

She gave a surprised yelp when a pair of people seemed to appear out of nowhere and jump clear of the van as we rushed down the sidewalk then we were past the patch of shattered concrete and careening down the street and around a corner. I let go of the death grip I had on my seat and looked at Hangman’s computer. “New plan, which safe house is closest?”

“We could go up to Chinatown,” she said, smoothing her hair down absently, “But Logan’s Square has better traffic heading out of the city this time of day.”

“Chinatown’s got a clean car, though,” Heavy pointed out, locking the safety on his shotgun but not putting it away yet. “We’d have to keep the van or boost new wheels if we go to the Square.”

“Chinatown it is then.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Let’s hope there’s no more surprises.”

——–

Helix

I hung up my phone and glanced at Jack. “Samson says they’ve found another batch of clothing that looks like it probably came from some of the people on the Avenue tonight.”

“Where at?” He asked, giving a critical look at the mouth of the alley we were standing by.

“Subway bathroom trashcan.” I sighed. “They’re checking security cameras now but they’re so far behind the curve…”

“We’re probably not catching them tonight.” Jack shrugged. “At least we’ve got the Emancipation Proclamation back.”

“Yes.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “So nice of Circuit to leave it there for us. I’d thank him, except it’ll be a PR nightmare once the press gets hold of it. ‘Shadow agency unable to retrieve stolen historical artifact before thief decides to return it to them.'”

“I noticed that you pretty much made the decision to use talents in public on your own,” Jack said, giving me an unreadable look. “Voorman didn’t okay that.”

“Circuit already outed that for us,” I said irritably. “If we kept trying to deny the existence of talented individuals now we’d just wind up loosing credibility. What are they going to do, fire me and cut their chances of catching Circuit even more?”

Jack started down the alley in front of me, saying, “In that case we need to get some kind of break that will convince Voorman and the Committee we can actually catch him. Let’s hope that Auburn and Mossman were right and there is the logical place for Circuit to leave his escape vehicle.”

“Oh, they were right. Too bad you didn’t get here sooner.” A hunched figure detached itself from the alley wall and came towards us slowly, cane clacking on the pavement. Jack stiffened a bit then relaxed when he realized he knew the voice.

I fought the urge to put my face in my hands. Or yell. Or just turn and start walking until I found a sane part of the world to settle down in and forget all about Project Sumter, Open Circuit and dead friends. Instead I took a deep breath and said, “Hello, Darryl. What brings you here?”

“What do you think, Helix?” Darryl fixed me with a burning glare. “I’m doing the same thing you are – trying to catch Open Circuit. My team almost had him a little while ago, probably could have trapped him if we had a couple more talents and better cooperation with the locals. Care to take my help on your case now?”

“If I don’t will you go away?”

He snorted. “Just until we both get within grabbing distance of Circuit again.”

Now I did rub my hand over my face. Every bone in my body told me to tell him no. Or have him arrested. That was also really tempting. But odds were he was working for some governmental body that did have jurisdiction here. So I gave the only answer I could make that wouldn’t make things worse.

“Get your people together and come on back to the office. We’ll talk it over with Voorman.”

Darryl raised an eyebrow. “And?”

I shook my head but forced myself to say it. “And this time I’ll be in your corner.”

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Water Fall: Cracks in the Dam

Posted by natechen on

Seven Hours Before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Helix

I threw my go bag down on my desk and slumped into my chair. It felt like it had been well over a year since I’d visited my desk, although it was really more like two and a half weeks, but by some miracle it had been kept clear of paperwork. Of course, I had a small book’s worth of handwritten notes in my bag that would have to be typed up and turned into something Cheryl could file. I wasn’t really looking forward to that, since it all basically boiled down to, “We talked to a lot of people who say they haven’t seen Circuit ever, or, if they’ll admit to that, not in the last six months to a year.”

That was probably to be expected, Circuit had to have been planning his most recent job for some time and for something of this size it’s no surprise that he avoided using any contacts we already knew about. It’s entirely possible that he’d even set up an entire network just to carry out this one job. That would be the kind of ridiculous groundwork I’ve come to expect from him.

Jack deposited his bag on the ground next to his desk, which was right beside mine, and gave me a critical look. “You should go home and get some sleep, Helix. You look like you’ve been awake for the past month.”

“How do you know I haven’t?” I gave him a critical look. I had no doubt I looked pretty rough, I sure felt like I’d run the whole way from Evansville back to the regional office. But never let it be said that Agent Jack Howell let a little road trip get him down, he still looked like he always did: like he was too big to quite get his suit to sit right. Today that was enough to make him look fresher and more alert than anyone else on the team, even the normally unflappable Teresa.

And he wasn’t about to pass up the chance to rub it in. “Because, unlike some of us, you look like you’ve been sleeping on park benches, not beds.”

“Some of the places we’ve stayed, that might be what those beds started life as.” I rubbed my eyes blearily, seriously tempted to do as Jack suggested. After two weeks on the road, no one was feeling their best. But I’d seen Teresa headed off towards her office a moment ago and I was willing to bet she wasn’t planning to leave any time soon. Bergstrum and Kesselman were at their desks just behind us and Mossburger had headed back towards Records. Now was not the time to be lying down on the job.

I glanced at the time and shrugged. “It’s barely after noon. I can put in a few hours before knocking off.”

“Suit yourself.”

Jack started unpacking his bag and I did the same. In about ten minutes I had all the stuff that was supposed to go back in my desk put away and my notes in a pile on one corner of the desk. With a sigh I picked them up and started sorting them into chronological order…

——–

Five Hours Before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Massif

Lincoln claimed he was getting closer to finding Hangman, who he insisted was not as inactive as people had originally thought. Apparently he’d spent the last two weeks dragging Records personnel off of whatever assignments they’d been given and running them through archives and computer code from all over the Internet to help him find traces of Hangman’s activity. It had become almost an obsession for him.

I knew this partly because, when I’d gotten back into town two days ago I’d checked in with sifu to see if Lincoln had found anything. Sifu told me the family practically hadn’t seen him since the week before. Now, outside of wushu training, I hadn’t really gotten to know Lincoln much and I couldn’t tell if that kind of behavior was typical. But sifu didn’t seem to find it that surprising so I didn’t worry myself. If there was anything worth reporting I figured I would hear about it.

The other way I knew it was because, as soon as she heard I was back, Cheryl asked me to drop by so she could complain.

“Look, Agent Massif, I know that he’s working on an assignment that’s important to the Project but he can’t keep diverting our resources like this.” She leaned back in her chair, drumming her fingers on the empty desk. We’d moved into the vacant Records supervisor’s office since Cheryl wanted privacy for this conversation. There was only the one chair in the room at the moment so I was standing. Looming over Cheryl like that should have given me the upper hand in the conversation but it really didn’t feel that way. “In fact, in the last two days I don’t think he’s called for a single file from the archives. Put him out on the floor or turn him over to Analysis but get him out of our hair.”

“No.” I folded my arms over my chest and did my best to give her a hard look without anything more than a vague idea of where her eyes were. “Lincoln’s probably familiar with a lot of the big picture, our structure and a general idea of what some talents do, he’s still not cleared for the specifics of our open cases. He doesn’t even know about Circuit, just that Hangman is a person of interest in an open case. There’s too much classified information he could overhear in Analysis or on the floor. You Records people don’t discuss what you file; you just keep it in order. I think it’s the best place to keep him and Harriet agrees with me.”

“He’s in the way,” Cheryl said, sitting up and dropping her voice. “We don’t discuss active cases as much as you field agents or Analysis do but we still have to watch our step when he’s around.”

“Look, I know you’re busy but my team has been busy suppressing rumors related to the Emancipation Proclamation theft for the last four days, and before that we were all over the state of Indiana trying to find traces of Circuit.” I spread my hands helplessly. “We just don’t have the people to keep an eye on him right now and he’s part of an active investigation. If it’s becoming a problem, take it up with Voorman or apply for field work and take over that angle of the investigation yourself.”

I turned and headed towards the door because I really felt I didn’t have time to argue any more. Helix was supposed to be getting back sometime that afternoon and I wanted to see if he had anything new we could follow up on. Lying to the media and the victims of crime is a part of our job but it’s never sat well with me. My priest tells me I’m forgiven when I go to confession but it doesn’t do much for the guilt. And I have to wonder what the lies do to the people we tell them to. At the very least, in the case of Agent Herrera, I heard they created long term issues. As I reached for the doorknob I found myself almost envying Cheryl her dilemma-free Records work.

Then she said, “I transferred here in the oversight program, you know. Made it halfway through the training course before I got sidelined. Some sort of autoimmune problem led to a dethatched retina. There was a surgery and a long recovery time.” I heard the chair she sat in push back from the desk, caught a glimpse of movement as she stood and approached me, resolving into a solid shape as she got closer. What I could make out of her face suggested she was mad. Really mad. “I’m legally blind without corrective eyewear, get something like 20/80 vision with it. And I have permanent gaps in my vision. It’s enough to keep me out of the field. But don’t ever think I’m just here to babysit your files and extraneous personnel. I could do deskwork for any hidebound bureaucracy on the planet, I stay here because I know how important Project Sumter is. Let me do my job and I’ll let you do yours.”

The bitterness in her tone was strong enough I caught myself cringing, just a bit, and straightened back up. “I’ll talk to Lincoln.”

“Good.” Cheryl pushed past me and out of the office, leaving me feeling a little disoriented and very ashamed.

——–

One Hour, Fifteen Minutes Before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Circuit

I tugged the scarf around my neck, accepted my long jacket from Simeon and slung it over one arm. The small garage on the city outskirts we were staging from wasn’t particularly cold, compared to outside, and I was already feeling a bit warm. The heavy pillar containing the Emancipation Proclamation had just been loaded onto the main van and strapped down. I touched my fingers onto the electrical contacts in the palms of my hands and ran a quick final check on the wiring in my gear. It wasn’t too late to cancel if things weren’t just right but it turned out I didn’t need to worry. Everything checked out.

Time to call it. “Heavy?”

“Everything looks good, boss,” he said, poking his head out of the back of the van and patting the Proclamation affectionately. “You want to make ’em let your people go? I think maybe they’ll hear you with this.”

“Grappler?”

She took off her signature long vest, folded it and handed it to Simeon, who slung it under one arm without comment. Then she slung her SMG and said, “I’m ready, so is crowd control.”

I nodded at her weapon. “Make sure the CC teams know we’re not actually planning to hurt anyone unless we absolutely have to.”

“Hurting regular people means they’re less likely to help us later.” She shrugged. “I get it. But you know how it is.”

Another nod, because I did know, and it was back to addressing the room at large. “Wallace?”

A van’s hood closed with a bang and Wallace leaned on top of it, wiping greasy hands. “Everything’s hooked up and running to Davis’ specs. I dunno if it’s gonna work as advertised but that’s not my department.”

“No it’s not. You and Simeon beat feet to Chainfall and see if there’s anything you can do there. Hangman?”

“No one’s ever done anything exactly like this before,” she said, tapping the bulkier than normal laptop she had an equally oversized shoulder bag. “But I should be able to kill satalite coverage of the city for fifteen minutes. We’ve got no more than that.”

“That’s still five more than we were expecting.” I rubbed my hands together and looked over the crowd of people we’d pulled together for this, the bang that signaled the opening of Operation Chainfall, the prelude to Thunderclap and the beginning of the end. “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s showtime.”

——–

Helix

“Hey.”

I snapped awake and nearly slid out of my chair. Lying face down on your desk is not a comfortable way to sleep so I’d apparently decided to drift off leaning back in my chair instead. When Teresa woke me I’d slid so low I would have jerked myself straight onto the floor if I hadn’t grabbed onto the edge of my desk first. I took a moment to get myself in a better sitting position, ignoring Jack’s snickering and the papers I’d dropped on the floor, and said, “Something up?”

She smiled slightly and tossed another stack of papers onto my desk. “Latest write-ups on the efforts to keep the Proclamation theft quiet.”

“By which you mean the use of talents in that robbery quiet,” I said, picking up the stack and looking it over blearily. “The robbery itself was in the news for almost a week, I think they know about it in sub-Saharan Africa already.”

“Maybe.” She shrugged. “So far none of the major news agencies have mentioned women walking on walls or men jumping off balconies without getting hurt.”

“Sounds like there’s a ‘but’ in there.”

Teresa smiled. “In this case the key word is ‘major’. Several local news sources have hinted at strange goings on, to say nothing about the tabloids.”

“Did we feed any of the tabloids the real story to help discredit it?”

“Better than that.” I glanced over the top of the papers in curiosity. “We broke the details up into two stories and sold them to different rags. Now if the real story comes out it will look like someone just took them and ran them together to try and make things more sensational.”

I tossed the report on my desk in disgust. “This is still threatening to get away from us. Sooner or later someone’s going to be able to put out real, solid proof and we’re going to wind up looking like fools. We’ll wish we’d thought about our own credibility then.”

She sighed, picked up the report and put it on top of my go bag. “For now, just make sure your familiar with the story so you can stick with it in the field.”

“I guess I’ll have to.” I picked up the papers again and opened my bag, looking for a free spot to put them.

I’d just decided I could squeeze them under the laundry and next to my shaving kit when I heard Voorman yelling. That’s about as common as snow in June around these parts. My head snapped up and I saw him come rushing into the room, Samson trailing behind him like a thundercloud, yelling, “Clear the floor. We are now at Condition One, clear the floor!”

Clear the floor is one of those phrases that has it’s own unique meaning in Project Sumter. In fact, we drill on clearing the floor once a month, at least when we’re actually in the office. I was turning my chair upside down and shoving it on top of my desk before Voorman was finished talking. Desks started sliding towards the edges of the room within fifteen seconds. Mine was near the center of the room and I never got a chance to move it myself, Voorman said something to Teresa, who had stopped on her way back to her office to see what was going on, and she came and pulled me aside.

The first thing I said was, “What happened?”

“I’m not sure but Voorman wants you on it.”

There’s a giant map of the US built into the floor of the room, which is why the euphamism for that palce is “the floor” and not something else, but there’s not enough room in most buildings for a map of that scale to be left clear all the time so it doubles as the field team’s staging room. Voorman was pacing along one wall, waiting for the carpet over the map to be rolled back, when we got through the chaos and over to where he was.

“Open Circuit just hit Michigan Avenue,” he said without preamble. “A couple of city blocks were knocked out by EMP, he gave a speech while flying-”

“Flying?!” Teresa and I demanded in unison.

“Flying! Don’t ask me how.” Voorman shook his head in exasperation. “We heard through the police switchboard once they got a clear picture of what happened.”

“When was this?” Teresa asked.

“Minutes ago, less than ten, I believe. They were very excited about it.” Voorman gave no sign of amusement at that colossal understatement. “There were hundreds of people there.”

I thought about what I’d just been reading. “How are we planning to keep this quiet?”

“I don’t think we can. The fallout from this could break the Project. Only chance we have of weathering this is to grab Circuit before he can make things worse.” Voorman gave me a surprisingly steady look for a man who was usually a big ball of nervous energy.. “I think we all know you’re the best person for that job. Find Massif, take Samson and get it done.”

In spite of the insanity of the situation I felt a satisfied smile creep across my face. “It would be a genuine pleasure.”

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The Michigan Avenue Proclamation
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Water Fall: Seismic Shock

Posted by natechen on

Two Weeks, Five Days Before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Massif

There wasn’t much to see at the reception, at least not from our point of view. Sure, there were a lot of interesting looking displays of pictures, letters and other junk that probably had historical significance or near significance of one kind or another. But I couldn’t imagine that stealing it would get Circuit anything worthwhile. Helix seemed to think there was something symbolic at work but I just couldn’t think what kind of symbolic statement you could make with original copies of political cartoons from a hundred and fifty years ago. He had some idea what Circuit might be after but no one had thought to pass it down to us and, since the event had come to light only hours before it started, there hadn’t been time for a conventional briefing.

That pretty much left us to wander around and try to guess exactly what Helix thought Circuit might have been out to steal.

Unfortunately I’ve never been as good at reading people as Helix, who I swear is some kind of a savant, or even some of the more experienced field agents like Harriet or Bob Sanders. And symbolism is almost always a visual thing, so that’s not really my forte either. Which pretty much left me moving through the crowd at random and hoping I’d catch something of significance. This is known as the ‘get lucky’ school of policing and it’s not generally of much use in real life, although many fictional detectives do quiet well with it. Still, when it’s the only game in town you go with what you’ve got.

The book room wasn’t that crowded. Once you entered the door closest to the elevator there were bookshelves to the left, a table almost directly in front of you and a freestanding bookcase in the middle of the room on the right. I was following the wall around the outside of the room, finding these things out, when I discovered a second set of doors, closed and locked, in the middle of the back wall. I stared at it, trying to find a sign or something that would tell me what it was.

I was still looking when Samson stopped beside me and asked, “Did you find something?”

“I dunno,” I said, doing my best not to look directly at him. “Can you see anything that tells us what’s in here?”

There was a moment’s quiet, then, “No. It doesn’t look like it’s labeled. Maybe an equipment closet?”

“Could be.” I shrugged and jiggled the handle again, as if that would make the door magically spring open. “I guess we could ask the librarian.”

A short pause, then Samson said, “I think I see him over by the Emancipation Proclamation.”

I turned to give him a blank stare. “The what?”

That’s when the fire alarm went off and the shooting started.

——–

Circuit

In the age of electronic surveillance the person most adept at manipulating computers has a distinct edge. While it’s not an inherent part of the fuse box talent, if you’re very, very good at pattern recognition and you practice a lot you can manipulate and even program computers, to a certain extent. But the ability to do that assumes a lot, like familiarity with the computer systems you’re going to be working with, or a lot of time to feel your way by trial and error.

At that particular moment, in the library’s security room, I had neither. And keeping up a running dialog with Hangman kept me from concentrating like I normally would. “What did she say?”

“Just that she could watch her own back and that she didn’t need a couple of wannabe master th-” Hangman caught herself before saying thieves but it was a near thing. From this I gathered she was still in an occupied part of the library. “Sticking their nose into her business.”

“She may think differently when that monster priest from Sumter comes after her.” And Rodriguez hadn’t left the area around the rare book room. He was big enough to pick out easily on the security camera, browsing casually through displays. Worse, I was pretty sure I saw the immovable wall man Hangman said was called Aluchinskii Massif. We still had no idea what his talent was.

I couldn’t program the local network by touch but I could “type” much faster than a person who was constrained by an actual keyboard. It took a second to find a part of the keyboard conductive enough to let me trip the keys – I actually wound up ripping out the Enter key and working through the exposed contact – but once that was done I was off, working rapidly through menus and shortcut commands to asses my options and the building’s state of lockdown.

As it turns out, libraries are not built with lockdown in mind. We still had plenty of options.

“That means she’s still going to make a try for the objective,” I said in resignation.  “I need you to find some place where you won’t draw attention and feed her the new plan. And Heavy has new work orders, too…”

——–

Massif

As always, hindsight is twenty-twenty – even for someone like me. It later turned out that the Lincoln Foundation either owned or had borrowed a printed copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, from the original print run, signed by Lincoln himself, and put it on display.

Their means of securing it consisted of encasing the document in a Plexiglas sandwich-board about two inches thick and a foot square. This was, in turn, chained to a plastic easel so it was more or less at chest height. It was way too bulky to be moved easily and there was no way it could be concealed.

When the fire alarm went off Applewood and the security guard spooked. Since the rare book room fire system put out fires by sealing airtight and flooding the room with chemicals that sucked oxygen out of the room – a method that’s better for the books than spraying water all over the place – they had good reason. The guard started trying to hustle people out the doors while Applewood went and hit a button on the wall that would prevent the doors from sealing. Samson and I were still trying to figure out what had happened when we heard the gunshots.

That was the thief, who we later guessed was Grappler, shooting through the chain with a .45 so she could remove the Emancipation Proclamation.

To say it got our attention would be an understatement. Unfortunately it panicked everyone else in the room even more. Whether or not they knew that they faced immanent suffocation – and since not even I knew that at the time I’m betting most of them didn’t – guns are still pretty scary to the average person.

Most of the not-so-average people I know, too.

We were in no danger of getting knocked over but getting through the crowd without hurting anyone was another matter entirely. I actually saw Samson rise up on his toes, almost like a ballet dancer, the potential forces he kept in check seeming to draw deeper into him, away from fragile civilians. Then I saw Grappler running down the hallway outside.

I couldn’t make it out but they tell me she just stuck the Plexiglas holding the Proclamation on her back. Literally stuck it there, although there’s nothing sticky about Plexiglas. This is a big part of the reason why we assumed she was Grappler, while her talent is called wall walking it’s really just control the friction of a surface.

What I could see was Dominic moving to block her as she went down the hall. And Grappler going up the wall, running as effortlessly over the windows to the room we were in as she had on the ground below.

No matter how much we’re trained to expect this things, the human mind will never be quite prepared for that kind of weirdness and Dom hesitated a vital second before changing his stance. It was enough time for Grappler to hop off the wall and onto his chest, knocking him flat. Somewhere along the way she added an absurd friction coefficient to his bulletproof vest, effectively locking him in place until he could squirm out of a couple layers of clothes.

Harriet wasn’t in a position to block Grappler at all and the area was too crowded to risk shooting at her. As a result, Grappler made it over the edge of the balcony and down into the lobby below without anyone else in a position to stop her. Samson and I reached the balcony just in time to see her bolt through a pair of doors on the left hand side.

With no one on the floor below to get in the way Agent Samson decided the best way to keep up was to vault over the railing and freefall to the ground. I’m not sure what kind of trick he pulled to land without hurting himself but it wasn’t a stunt I could duplicate. I had to keep one hand on the wall as I fell, transferring the impact on landing from my feet to the wall and cracking the wooden panelling badly.

Samson literally covered the entire distance from his landing spot to the doors Grappler had gone through in a single step, despite it being a good twenty feet. He crashed through the door at the end only to yank himself back to the tune of more gunfire. Sure, he was wearing a vest but he wasn’t stupid.

Stupid was my department and I was glad to have the work. It took me a little longer to get to the door but the gunfire continued the whole time, keeping Samson from going through the door. Grappler must have been carrying more than one weapon. Samson let me through the door as soon as I got there. I found Grappler at the other end of a long hallway that sloped gently downwards, then pulled a sharp left hand turn. As soon as she realized her bullets weren’t hurting me Grappler bolted off around the corner.

I expected a repeat performance as I rounded the corner after her. What I found was a couple of steps up and a midsized room beyond. It turned out that this was where the library’s freight elevator let out. The hallway went straight through the room and farther into the building. Grappler was already out of the loading area into the hall beyond, ducking through a door. But I only got a glimpse of her around the huge, rattily dressed African American man who was in the middle of pouring a bucket of water onto the floor.

He glanced up at me just long enough for me to notice he had a scarf pulled around his face then swept his hand across the wet floor and bolted down the hall towards the door Grappler had taken. Naturally I went after him.

Unnaturally, I found myself stuck to the floor. Instead of being slippery, which I’d been ready for, the water on the floor was as thick and sticky as glue. When my foot refused to pull free I staggered, catching myself on the wall just in time to avoid getting my entire right side caught in the mess. I reached down for my shoelaces, intending to go barefoot and try and find a way around, when to my surprise Samson vaulted up on my back and from there across the room. Anyone else would have been squashed flat but I guess Samson was counting on my ability to stand up under pretty much anything to keep me on my feet.

And he wasn’t wrong but it would have been nice to be consulted first.

It only took Samson a second to get down the rest of the hall and through the door the other two had taken. Almost as soon as he was through it I heard a series of muffled whumps that sounded an awful lot like muffled explosions, followed by a lot of very loud crashing…

——–

Circuit

As soon as I confirmed that Grappler and Heavy had made it up the stairwell and Rodriguez had been blinded by the ink grenades Heavy had dropped for him I fried the security switchboard with an EMP and made myself scarce, taking a different set of back stairs up to the first floor to meet Hangman. We were evacuated outside the library with all the other library patrons and staff. To avoid drawing attention we milled around in confusion with the rest of the crowd for a little while, during which time Heavy called and let me know that Wallace had picked the two of them up on time and they’d gotten away clean.

Five minutes later we returned to the car Hangman had arrived in and left. It was a closer call than I would have liked, but we’d gotten what we came for and more people than even Sumter could silence had seen what we did and, more importantly, how we did it.

All in all, not a bad day’s work.

——–

Helix

Our van pulled up to chaos. A couple of ambulances were still parked around the library and a fire truck was just leaving when we arrived. I leapt down from the back of our van and waded into the confused crowd of library staff, EMTs, police and Project agents, trying to find someone who looked like they knew what was going on.

I found Amplifier sitting in the back of an ambulance, wrapped in a blanket and holding a bottle of water. She gave me a weak smile and said, “Hi, Helix.”

Leaning against the side of the same ambulance, scrubbing his face with a towel, was the familiar bulk of Manuel Rodriguez. He looked like he’d been attacked by a flock of angry fountain pens. I realized that the person sitting in the door of a police cruiser just down the street was Al Massif. For some reason he had, as the poem says, one shoe off and one shoe on.

For a second I just stared around at the disaster in awe. I felt my shoulders slump and, although I thought I already knew the answer, I asked, “What happened here?”

Amplifier glanced away. I don’t think Rodriguez heard me over his efforts to scrub his face clean, Al looked over like he was seeing me for the first time, which he probably was. No one gave me an answer until Teresa walked over, face grim. “Circuit got away with a copy of-”

“All this,” I said, waving expansively at the bedlam around us. “And he got away?”

Teresa sighed. “Unless you have any ideas about where he might have gone?”

I grit my teeth and did my best to choke down my irritation. “Well, the last time he worked in Indiana he used contacts in South Bend, Winchester and Evansville.” I hauled out my phone and started looking up contact numbers.

“What are you doing?” Amplifier asked.

I glanced up at her. “Working my case. Are you going to be okay, kid?”

“Sure.” She managed to squeeze out another lackluster smile.

“Great. Then let’s leave the cleanup to the locals and run down some of these people, see if they can give us any leads before the trail goes cold…”

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Water Fall: Ocean’s Currents

Posted by natechen on

Two Weeks, Five Days Before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Circuit

“No, of course I don’t think I’m Nicholas Cage,” I said in annoyance. “I wish you people would stop suggesting that I do.”

“You do a pretty good impression, that’s all I’m saying, boss,” Heavy replied, slouching along behind me. “You’re a bit shorter, sure, and he’s got a different nose, but otherwise…”

“Enough.” I stepped up onto the sidewalk and onto the fair sized plaza just outside the target building. “For once let’s try to do this without any witty banter, hm?”

“Yeah, right!” The response came in stereo, from both Heavy to my left and Hangman in my earpiece.

“We’re going into a public building this time, boss,” Heavy added. “This is the time for witty banter. I lived out of a library for a month and a half, it’s what they expect from people like me.”

There wasn’t much to say to that, Heavy was dressed like someone who’d spent the last month or two living rough and we’d gone with that since it was a very typical kind of person you can expect to find around a public library. Heavy assured me that building security wouldn’t look twice so long as he didn’t cause trouble and I was willing to take his word on it. I was less sure how much witty banter they’d be expecting from him but you can’t win everything so it’s important to pick your battles.

Speaking of building security, it was waiting for me as I came into the building, a slightly overweight man in his thirties with a scruffy blonde beard and a pleasant greeting. He nodded at me as I came through the doors off the plaza and returned his attention to the outside. I gave him a polite nod in return and glanced around. To my right was a wall with various large alcoves full of book displays, to my left a short hallway that split to give access to a coffee shop in one direction and some meeting rooms and the local public access television station in the other. Going straight took me into a large, cavernous hallway that ran up through both above ground floors of the building. According to the plans we’d studied I could use either the main hall or the side hall to reach my destination but the side hall would make getting there easier, so I took a right and headed that way.

Once I was in the hallway and made sure there was no one near by I touched my earpiece and said, “One guard accounted for at the east entrance.”

“Got it,” Hangman said. “Grappler’s now patched into the building’s wifi phone system.”

“Any sign that they’re aware of our presence?” I didn’t think there would be but it never hurts to check.

“None.” An immediate reply. “Their security is really shoddy. Are you sure you don’t want to do something about that guard?”

“No. This is a public library, Hangman, not City Hall, or even a bank. That guard wasn’t even armed. Think about it – most of the things people could want in this building is already available for free and don’t have much resale value.” I glanced at a room full of computers as I passed by it. “And what might be worth taking isn’t exactly easy to make off with. Even for a top rate library system, security exists less to keep people from taking things as keeping out minor troublemakers. They leave any really big problems to the police.”

“But what if he tries to make problems when you head back out?”

“Ah.” I smiled, even though Hangman couldn’t see it. “Leave that to Heavy.”

The elevator doors opened with a cheerful “ding” as soon as I pressed the call button. According to the blueprints, this elevator led to staff-only parts of the building. It wouldn’t take me anywhere without a staff ID badge to swipe over the scanner, at least in theory. In practice, those kind of electronic security measures are even less effective against me than normal locks.

It was a short ride down to the subbasement, which in the vernacular is the basement below the basement. When I got there I stepped out into a room full of brightly lit shelves of books. They ran off a good forty or fifty feet to my right, another ten or fifteen to my left. I headed to the left, asking, “What’s Grappler’s position now?”

“She’s entered the west side of the building-”

“Excuse me, sir?” I turned to find a stocky kid in his early twenties poking his head out of one of the aisles. A waist high wooden cart with a couple of shelves half full of books sitting next to him led me to suspect he was an employee. “Are you looking for the Lincoln Foundation event?”

“Yes.” As a general rule of thumb, the professional criminal can get away with a lot more if they allow other people to supply excuses for them. I gave the kid my best slightly confused look. “This isn’t the place?”

“Well, their office is down that way,” he said, pointing in the direction I’d been headed. On the blueprints the room there hadn’t been labeled and we’d assumed it was storage, but I could see that there were a number of plaques and pictures of Lincoln on the walls so perhaps it had been repurposed since the building was built. “But it’s closed right now. I think the Lincoln Library people are up one floor, schmoozing with the guests in the rare book room.”

I let myself smile slightly. Another reason to design my equipment with an eye for refinement – in awkward situations people are more likely to think well of a well dressed man. With my gear hidden under a tailored vest and suit jacket I no doubt looked like I would fit right in with the other schmoozers. “I guess I got pointed in the wrong direction.”

The employee sighed and put the book he was holding back on his cart. “Well come on. I’ll take you to the right elevator.”

I made a motion as if signaling for him to lead on. As soon as he started to move past me I grabbed him with both hands and triggered my taser. I felt a little bad for him, since he wasn’t even a security officer and he couldn’t possibly have signed up with this kind of thing in mind. But I’d have felt even worse if he’d reported me and I didn’t actually want join whatever kind of even the Lincoln Foundation was sponsoring, either. So I took his cart, quickly stacked the books there onto a mostly empty shelf, then slung the unconscious employee over the cart and wheeled him along with me.

Just around the corner and down the hall from the Lincoln Library office was the main security station. I brought the cart to a stop outside and poked my head through the door. A guard was sitting at a large desk in the center of the room; sitting on the desk were at least a dozen computer monitors switching between views of the building’s security cameras. There was some miscellaneous equipment strewn around the desk, I suspected at least some of it had to do with making the badges the staff used to get around. In short, it was pretty typical.

The guard at the desk looked up, a moment of confusion crossing her face. She was a middle aged African-American woman and I got the immediate impression that she’d see right through a merely average excuse. Fortunately I’d brought a prop along. “Excuse me.” I jerked a thumb at the man I’d just tased. “I found this guy collapsed outside the elevator down the hall.”

“Who are you?” The guard replied, getting to her feet and coming cautiously around the side of the desk.

“I’m a guest at the Lincoln Foundation event,” I said, figuring if it worked once it might work again. “I was on my way down when I found him.”

The guard sighed. “Somebody sent you to the wrong place,” she said, stepping towards the door and the cart beyond it, clearly intending to have a look at the man there. “They’re on the next-”

I slung her onto the cart, too, then found a roll of tape in the guard’s desk and made sure neither one of my new friends would be causing problems then I closed the door to the security room and took the seat behind the desk. “I’m in the security room. They won’t be able to call for help this way.”

“Good.” There was a hint of amusement in Hangman’s voice. “Do you want that update on Grappler? Or is there more trouble to take care of, first?”

“Like taking candy from a baby.” I leaned back in the chair and studied the monitors. “What’s Grappler up to?”

——–

Massif

“Why didn’t Helix just fly in with us?” Amp asked as we hustled down the library’s main hallway, the security guard just in front of us.

“His tactical team needs too much specialized equipment that wasn’t on hand. Driving it over is easier and faster than trying to bring it along on the flight.” Harriet glanced at her watch. “With all the time we spent getting to and from airports and other nonsense he’s probably no more than a half an hour to an hour behind us.”

I shot a glance to my left, where Agent Samson was keeping pace while studying the building with open curiosity. “What I don’t understand is why you’re here.”

Samson turned to me, a nauseating display of shifting movement, and I wondered, not for the first time, how other people couldn’t notice what a freak he was. Surely that much contained energy was noticeable. “I’m not sure what you and Helix have against me, Agent Massif, but I do have my own case to follow up on. And I didn’t get to do much when we raided that arms dealer’s warehouse.”

“We could use an extra set of eyes,” Dominic said in a placating tone as he ran his hands over his gear for the umpteenth time, checking on it’s placement. “I’ve never bumped into Circuit before but from what I’ve read he’s a master at giving us the slip. More people with tricks to keep him guessing, happier I’ll be.”

I just grunted and waved to get the guard’s attention. “Any word from the party, yet?”

The man just patted his walkie talkie. “You’d have heard it at the same time I would, sir. Even with event security there’s not a whole lot of us here this time of night and it’s a big building. It may take a few minutes for the other guard to get there from wherever they were.”

“Right.” I sighed. The desk guard had let the switchboard and the roaming guard in the building know we thought someone might be coming to disrupt the Lincoln Financial Foundation’s event. Even with a small financial group backing them the Foundation needed cash to keep going and relied on private backers to help maintain it’s operating budget. Helix thought that Circuit had picked the locations for his recent activities because they pointed to the people he thought were most important in his private vendetta against Project Sumter. Charleston and Atlanta because of their connection to his family, Phoenix because it was the place where he first made a name for himself.

But the person who instituted all the rules that Circuit found so onerous was Abraham Lincoln. He decided to keep talented people secret and out of positions of authority, a stance the government still adhered to. Which meant Circuit still needed to make a play for something related to the 16th president. Why Helix thought he’d do that here instead of somewhere more high profile, like the Lincoln Memorial in DC, was less clear to me.

I mean, when I think Abraham Lincoln, the library in Fort Wayne, Indiana is not what pops to mind first. I’d look into that memorial, or maybe Ford’s Theater or something.

Still, he’d managed to convince Voorman the idea had merit so here we were. I drifted back to Amp and quietly said, “Can you hear anything coming from downstairs?”

“If you’re going to whisper like that you need to work on your diction.” I didn’t actually see her lips move when she said that. The words just sort of drifted into my ears, barely above a murmur, and I was pretty sure I was the only one hearing them. Creepy. “There’s too much noise in this stupid big hallway. Acoustics are bad, sorting things is tough. If there’s any sound leaking up from the basement it’s being drowned out.” She cocked her head to the side in a thoughtful pose. “Not that I’m not listening. So some quite please?”

I shrugged, since that seemed fair enough. It was only a few more steps to the stairs down anyway.

“Hold up.” Dom had his hand on the security guard’s arm, keeping him from starting down the stairs. My tac team lead looked back at me and asked, “Do we want to go in live?”

“No,” Harriet said. “There’s no signs he’s actually here yet. We’re already going down there with body armor and weapons. No need to alarm the guests further.”

“We appreciate that, ma’am,” the guard said. Dom moved his hand and he led us down the stairs.

The so-called rare book room was a floor down from the main hall. The stairs let out on a small landing that overlooked some kind of lobby. To the right was a short hallway line with glass cabinets. Locked security doors on either end presumably let into the stacks in the rest of the building while the other side of the hallway looked into the room we were after.

The doors into the rare book room were open and a number of people were milling about inside and in the hallway. There were a bunch of displays set up, which I’m sure were very interesting, but that’s not what we were there for. The guard wandered into the crowd and returned in less than a minute leading an impossibly thin man who was even taller than me.

“This is Vern Applewood,” the guard said. “He’s in charge of the Lincoln Library.”

“Hello.” Harriet pulled out her ID and displayed it, I think we were posing as FBI agents this time around but the librarian didn’t seem that impressed. “Mr. Applewood, do you have a guest list for this event?”

“No.” His answer was quick and blunt. “This is an open charity event, we’re hoping to attract as many prospective donors as possible. Even if we had one I don’t think I could share it with you.”

“Then let’s look at it from a different angle…”

Harriet sounded like she was getting ready for unproductive conversation with an unpleasant man. Thinking I might get a head start on actual productive work I glanced around for Amplifier.

She wasn’t there.

I mentally cursed myself for not paying attention – by definition she was the most noticeable person in the room, at least for me. How could she have wandered off?

A second, slower look around confirmed that she wasn’t there. If she had been the weird effect her sound manipulation had on the movement in the air would have stood out like a beacon. Muttering under my breath I pulled out my cell phone to call her. I had no bars.

“You can’t get signal down here,” the guard said helpfully. “We have to use wifi phones or landlines to keep the people who work down here in touch.”

“Great.” I shoved the phone back into my pocket. I glanced at Lance Baudin, the other man on my tactical support team. “Go upstairs and find Amplifier or get her on the phone, tell her to get down here.”

He gave me a surly nod, which is typical for him, and headed back up the stairs.

——–

Circuit

Screaming in someone’s ear while they’re in a dangerous situation is not helpful so I waited until the brief sounds of a scuffle ended before asking, “What’s happening, Hangman?”

There was no answer. I started toggling through the security cameras in an attempt to figure out what part of the building she was in. I’d gotten through about half of them when her voice finally came back. “I’m okay.”

“What happened?” I asked again.

“Some girl snuck up on me.” Hangman’s voice was shaking a little bit but she managed to keep going. “Wanted to know who I was talking to.”

“Who did you have on the line?” The security monitors continued to flick through cameras one after the other.

“Heavy.” Now it sounded like she was walking somewhere. “Circuit, she was wearing a bulletproof vest. I don’t like the looks of this.”

The screen showed a view of the room where the Lincoln Financial reception was and I paused it. I’d spotted familiar faces. “Switch me over to Grappler’s line.”

“Circuit, I don’t think the phones work like that. They’re-”

“Then tell her to get out of the building. Now. The job’s blown.” I leaned forward and tried to pick Grappler out of the crowd, as if looking at her would somehow make her aware of what I saw. “Project Sumter has come to call.”

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